Gears of War: Judgment - the Digital Foundry verdict
All in all, developer People Can Fly has stirred up a beautiful looking game, built primarily around surviving waves of enemies in turret defense style scenarios. The issue here is the relative lack of cinematic ambition compared to the last game, designed by Epic Games itself to show off something of the full potential of its engine technology. There's a plainness to the campaign design when taken as a full-blown sequel to Gears of War 3, with much more of a focus on multiplayer. Looking at things rather brutally, if you're a single-player sort of guy, you're left with a package that's more akin to an expansion pack, with the bonus Aftermath chapter suitably striving to tie up loose ends in the mainline story.
Even so, Gears of War: Judgment is an encore worth investing in for other reasons. Technically speaking, spectacular set-pieces in the vein of the past two games' may have been thrown to the wayside, but the baseline action is delivered with the most up-to-date revision of the engine, and the core gunplay remains as engaging as ever. The effects work, lighting and overall visual quality all show the technology is still firing on all cylinders here, and to its great credit, the striking level designs hold their own against the very best locales in Marcus' original adventures. The focus on improving multiplayer also pays off handsomely if that's your bag, for all the reasons Dan Whitehead mentioned in the 8/10 Eurogamer review.
As current-gen consoles enters their twilight years, it's clear that technological progress has slowed, and there are few tricks left up Unreal Engine 3's sleeve. But the engine won't die with the 360 and PS3 - its future is bright on mobile, and the DirectX 11 Samaritan demo suggests that the middleware still has something to offer for next-gen platforms. In the here and now, the biggest leap forward we've seen in UE3 titles has been reserved for PC, with Kepler-based GPUs running PhysX bringing about a big visual boon to games like Borderlands 2, with its full cloth and fluid simulation. Looking forward, we suspect that many of the major enhancements to Epic Games' tech will be flooding in with the launch of its first Unreal Engine 4 title. But for now, it remains a mystery as to whether the Gears of War franchise will continue to reflect this technical progress well into the next generation, or if Judgment is a sign that it's priming an entirely new IP to fill those shoes.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-gears-of-war-judgment
